The Grinch Comes to Omaha

Since the S&P 500 topped on September 21st, Berkshire Hathaway may have seen something on the order of over $30 billion in stock market drawdowns. It’s a startling number, even off of a large base of invested capital. According to Jim Sloan, writing at Seeking Alpha, the Berkshire portfolio’s losses from Apple alone could be as much as $19 billion over the last two months…

It’s obvious that the Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.B) portfolio of publicly traded stocks has taken a hit along with everything else in the recent downturn. Because of the large positions in Apple (AAPL) and large banks, the hit taken by Berkshire since the end of the 3rd quarter probably exceeds in percentage terms that of the market as a whole. An examination of the unrealized loss in value of several of Berkshire’s largest holdings through Friday, September 21, suggests the scale of the decline in portfolio value:

That’s more than $33 billion in a portfolio valued at $177 billion at the end of the third quarter and doesn’t include the rest of the portfolio which is smaller and probably declined at a bit lower rate. More than half the damage came from Apple alone.

Josh here. Of course, those numbers are close but not perfect, because we